Think January was a record-breaker of a month in terms of cold temperatures in the Philadelphia area? Think that the “Polar Vortex” played havoc with the low temperatures area residents faced in the first month of the New Year?

Think again.

According to records supplied by the National Weather Service in Mt. Holly, N.J., the low temperatures in January do not even qualify the just-passed month for the Top 20 on the cold hit parade.

The average temperature recorded in Philadelphia last month was 28.3 degrees, about 4.7 below the normal of 33 degrees, said Dean Iovino, a staff meteorologist for the weather service on Monday. Records show that the coldest January recorded in the area was 1977, when the average was a bitter 20 degrees.

But if you thought that the weekend’s warming trend was a harbinger of balmy days to come, you should reconsider your position.

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“It has been consistently cold, and the duration will continue on a bit longer,” Iovino said, noting that the forecasts for the coming weeks in February show below average temperatures.

“It looks like the cold will continue to hold on,” he said.

Iovino said that the cold weather could not be directly attributed to the media creation of a swooping “polar vortex.”

“I think the media has been misusing that term a bit,” he said. The airflow over the North Pole is always in a counterclockwise swirl, but nothing like winter hurricane or tornado conditions made out on the weather channels, he noted.

Not that the cold weather wasn’t a major nuisance for residents in the area, especially motorists.

In January, AAA’s Mid Atlantic region saw requests for emergency roadside service climb to record numbers – topping 222,000 for the month, the highest monthly volume on record, shattering the previous record month of December 2010 by nearly 16,000, the auto club said in a news release.

In addition, AAA Mid-Atlantic’s daily average requests for emergency roadside assistance topped nearly 7,200 in January, up from an average of 5,900 per day last January. The auto club has worked around the clock for nearly the entire month of January to not only help motorists crippled by the snow (25.9 inches in Philadelphia in January), but especially those whose car batteries weren’t strong enough to handle the extended cold that blanketed the Mid-Atlantic several times in January, it said.